Workbench

03/29/2009

Pro-torture conservatives liked to use the fictional TV show 24 to justify real life torture. The Washington Post reports that the real-life dynamic of the American torture program was considerably different from the dramatic ticking time bomb scenarios that powered the show.

As weeks passed after the capture (of Abu Zubaida) without significant new confessions,
the Bush White House and some at the CIA became convinced that tougher
measures had to be tried.

The pressure from upper levels of the government was "tremendous,"
driven in part by the routine of daily meetings in which policymakers
would press for updates, one official remembered.

"They couldn't stand the idea that there wasn't anything new," the
official said. "They'd say, 'You aren't working hard enough.' There was
both a disbelief in what he was saying and also a desire for
retribution -- a feeling that 'He's going to talk, and if he doesn't
talk, we'll do whatever.' "

So, instead of a ticking time bomb scenario with lives on the line, we have conference rooms full of bored bureaucrats and political operatives ordering up torture because they've got nothing else to do.

And then they lied about it. It's interesting to note that virtually everything the Bushies and their defenders have said about torture has proven to be a lie.

01/12/2009

The real reason the United States went to war in Iraq, it seems to me, is the neocon idea that overthrowing Saddam Hussein and building a democracy in Iraq would re-shape the Middle East. Whatever else informed the decision to invade -- dread of terrorism, overreaction to 9/11, personal loathing of Saddam -- at the heart of things was the idealistic notion that people everywhere are starving for American-style freedom. And it is fitting the the President's legacy on the war is ultimately dependent on how well the war fulfills that neocon daydream.

President Bush's apparently fervent hope is that his legacy will follow the arc of Harry Truman's. Truman was hugely unpopular in the early 1950s the same way President Bush is unpopular today. As Bush is reviled by the left and largely abandoned by the party he leaves in tatters, Truman was reviled by the right and so lacked support within his own party that he didn't even run for a second full term.

Truman, like Bush, was widely viewed as a stubborn man not smart enough to be President. The Korean War lasted longer and cost more than anyone had predicted. The President's refusal to allow General MacArthur to carry the war forward into newly communist China was highly unpopular, particularly when combined with Senator Joseph McCarthy's accusations that Truman's State Department was a nest of communist sympathizers. His integration of the armed forces did little to endear him to the dominant southern wing of his own party.

Time has, however, healed Truman's political wounds, and he's remembered as a plain-spoken everyman with impressive strength of character. That's what President Bush is hoping for, and his hopes are dependent on the war in Iraq being ultimately successful in
the overarching goal of reforming the Middle East. It's going to be interesting to see how that plays out.

The broad consensus is that that war has been a fiasco. Even supposing that it had been fought right -- and for four years it wasn't -- it still would have proved to be vastly longer and more costly than even the pessimistic supporters supposed. It could never have been sold honestly to the American people, and that taints -- for this generation, anyway -- whatever gains that we might earn there. It's hard to forget that we are where we were presented with overly optimistic victory scenarios with the obvious purpose of getting us into a war we wouldn't have chosen otherwise.

When compared to the easy war we were sold, 4,000 dead Americans sounds like a lot, and it is. But by historical standards 4,000 dead is barely a bad day. (This is meant in no way to minimize the tragedy of the war or the sacrifice of those who fought when called by their country.) Almost that many Americans died in one horrific afternoon at Antietam; more than 600,000 Americans died in the Civil War and our nation recovered from that. Nearly 10,000 Americans died in the invasion of Normandy and the battle to break-out from the beach head, and history has judged that a price worth paying.

Previous wars remind us of something else: History has a way of forgetting details and transient costs. General Grant is a heroic figure despite his massive waste of brave troops at Cold Harbor, and we've largely forgotten the debacles of World War II (Operation Market Garden and Anzio, just off the top of my head) in favor of a big picture gratitude for what that war accomplished.

There's a chance that history will do the same with President Bush and Iraq. It is possible that Iraq will fulfill the neocon vision, that it will stabilize without the presence of foreign forces, become some kind of model for the rest of the Middle East, and have a salutary influence on the political culture of that nightmarish region

It takes a lot of supposition to get to the rosy scenario that apparently sustains President Bush. But over the next couple of weeks, as the first-draft assessments of President Bush roll out of the media, remember that dismissing him as a failure simply because of the war may work today, but there's no telling what history will conclude. Stranger things have happened than history judging the War in Iraq a success.

The drive to salvage some kind of productive legacy from President Bush's disastrous term in office is borrowing a key strategy from his Administration: nothing is ever the President's fault.

Kevin A. Hassett, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and an adviser on President George W. Bush's reelection campaign, does what he would apparently rather not do, offering the President's best defense:

"The economy was caught up in a storm while he was president, but it wasn't his fault."

12/17/2008

As I look at the intelligence with respect to Iraq, what they got wrong was that there weren’t any stockpiles. What they found was that Saddam Hussein still had the capability to produce weapons of mass destruction. He had the technology, he had the people, he had the basic feed stock.

Except that no, he didn't. The Iraq Survey Group, predominantly staffed by Americans and dispatched by the coalition of the willing after the fall of Saddam to find those pesky weapons of mass destruction concluded exactly the opposite: that while Iraq still had scientists, it had none of the technology and no programs.

Nuclear scientists were told in general terms
that the program was over after 1991, and Tariq ‘Aziz inferred that the
scientists understood that they should not keep documents or equipment.
‘Aziz also noted that if Saddam had the same opportunity as he did in
the 1980s, he probably would have resumed research on nuclear weapons.

Of course, Saddam was in no danger of having the same opportunity in the 1980s, when he enjoyed the support of, among other countries, the United States. And while he forbade nuclear scientists from leaving the country (Saddam intended to focus more on chemical than nuclear weapons, according to the ISG), contrary to what Cheney said and may even believe Saddam emphatically did not have the capability to produce weapons of mass destruction.

So we've got three options, none of them attractive. First, Cheney could be lying. Second, he could be delusional. Finally, he could be entirely rational but with such a heightened threat awareness that he actually believes that Saddam's weapons "program" posed a real danger to us. In which case, he's a dangerous paranoid who might as well invade every university with a physics department.

No matter which of the three options it is, it's a good day when this guy is moved as far from the levers of power as possible.

12/16/2008

The Administration that brought you FEMA in New Orleans brings you the SEC on Wall Street:

The latest black eye for the commission came when inspectors and agency lawyers missed a series of red flags at Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities. If it had checked out the warnings, the commission might well have discovered years ago that the firm was concealing its losses by using billions of dollars from some investors
to pay others.

The firm was the subject of several inquiries
over the years, including one last year that was closed by the agency’s
New York office after it received a referral of potentially significant
problems from the Boston office.

Similarly, the agency’s chairman, Christopher Cox, assured investors nine months ago that all was well at Bear Stearns. It collapsed three days later.

Apparently, the Bush Administration's policy of decreased enforcement and voluntary compliance didn't work very well. It seems that greedy people with millions or even billions of dollars at stake, obsessed with their status among the hyperwealthy of Wall Street, will cheat and not tell the government about it. Whoever could have imagined that!

09/23/2008

The Bush Administration detains and abuses terrorism suspects, claiming they are not subject to the Geneva Conventions. The ACLU sues under the Freedom of Information Act to release photos of the abuse. Bush Administration lawyers refuse to release the photos, claiming that doing so would violate privacy rights guaranteed the terrorism suspects by the Geneva Conventions. Here.

07/31/2008

Pretend you're a pharmacist. You don't like birth control. Someone comes in with a birth control prescription and you refuse to fill it, so the customer goes somewhere else. The owner of the pharmacy finds out that you do this kind of thing all the time, that you're costing him tens of thousands of dollars in business because those customers never come back and the word-of-mouth on the pharmacy is terrible. The owner suggests that maybe you should seek another line of work. Or, if not another line of work, at least another place to work.

President Bush is on the verge of issuing a fiat protecting those who refuse to do their jobs and screwing those who pay them to do their jobs.

The Department of Health and Human Services is reviewing a draft regulation that would deny federal funding to any hospital, clinic, health plan or other entity that does not accommodate employees who want to opt out of participating in care that runs counter to their personal convictions, including providing birth-control pills, IUDs and the Plan B emergency contraceptive.

This is an old argument, usually framed as an issue of patient rights. It plays out most dramatically in small towns across the heartland, from whence emerge horror stories of raped women seeking morning-after birth control and being denied by religious zealots with gleaming eyes.

But this is a broader issue as well: are we going to establish the principle that people can refuse to do their jobs because of their religious beliefs and still retain those jobs? And are we going to allow the President, alone, to make decisions about what beliefs and actions are protected?

One of the blind spots of conservatives during the Bush Administration has been an understanding that people like them aren't going to hold power forever. George W. Bush, whose boundless wisdom protects us without the restraint of pesky things like laws, will be gone. A mere mortal will occupy the seat of limitless power. The ability to negate laws with signing statements, arrest and hold
"enemy combatants" without legal recourse, and the broad interpretation
of executive privilege that Republicans have argued in favor of are one
day going to be in the hands of people Republicans loathe.

And, eventually, someone's going to occupy the Oval Office who thinks it's a good idea to give vegetarians the right to work as grocery store checkers without having to handle meat, or protect worshipers of Gaia who shut down the ski lifts of the resorts where they work to prevent skiers from violating the mountain spirit.

If you empower government to protect people who refuse to do their jobs, more people are going to refuse to do their jobs. That may be great for those people, but it's bad for anybody with a customer to take care of. It's particularly bad for the small businesses that employ most of us, who need people to do the job in front of them and don't have a lot of other jobs and people to shuffle around to accommodate random religious beliefs.

This is not, as it's being postured from the right, a matter of religious discrimination -- except that President Bush wants to protect people who hold the same religious beliefs he does at the expense of people who don't. This is a fundamental question of government intrusion and Presidential power.

People are entitled to believe whatever they want to believe, but they aren't entitled to take whatever actions they want to take in the name of those beliefs. Every advocate of small government should object to the President's notion that he can do this kind of thing all on his own.